An important step to getting hired for all the game testing jobs you want is to become a true video game tester: the star of the team, or at least co-star. Reaching that level of competence implies going beyond what (finding errors) to how. How, exactly, do you discover bugs in the game? Ultimately, most bugs fall into two categories: design and gameplay bugs, or code bugs.
Understanding that you are not just testing a game, but testing software, will go a long way in finding and isolating bugs to deliver to developers for fixing. There are universal principles in the discipline of software testing, and when applied to video game testing, understanding these fundamentals will skyrocket your bug count and your salary. Then you’ll find employers begging to hire you, and you’ll have all the gaming testing jobs you could want.
Software testing is EVERYTHING about finding bugs: the more the merrier, the sooner the better. “Filing bugs early and often” is a great philosophy to bring to the table, as the earlier in the development process bugs are filed, the easier and cheaper it will be to fix them. But as with so many things, what is easy in theory is more difficult in practice: it is not until all the code is connected, “integrated”, that it is possible to test the game from start to finish. Therefore, most game testing jobs are announced in the alpha and beta release cycles, but the closer one starts to the alpha phase, the better.
At this stage of the game (pun intended), it’s really worth doing what’s called integration testing. Do all the main elements of the game integrate well? Or is the sound out of sync with the video? Is the player’s speech synchronized with the movements of the mouth? Are the sound effects in sync with the player’s action? Does the game save to disk, if it’s designed for it? Is the game compatible with all supported operating systems? These are just a few of the high-level areas one will want to investigate.
Getting to the heart of the matter, you should design a matrix that covers all of the major elements of gameplay and integration, and then break down each of those areas further. As an example, consider item storage. What are the various means of acquiring items? Buying, finding, looting and trading are the main ones; don’t forget the quest rewards. Once acquired, do they remain stored when exiting the game and then returning? Can you trade with other players? If you drop it, does it stay dropped? Can you sell items you found? done? Traded? Theft? As you can see, the possibilities are truly endless.
Game testing work is all about considering these details and possibilities. The strategy for dealing with such a large number of possibilities is to build a test case matrix based on how often a given scenario or test case is likely to occur. Then individual test cases and scenarios are ranked based on priority: P0, P1, P2, etc. So obviously buying and selling an item and making sure it stays in storage are pretty essential functions to the game – these would be P0. Being able to sell a quest item you stole from a looted corpse, minus, say, a P1.
These are just a few examples of applying basic software testing principles to game testing. Applying these principles will dramatically increase your bug count, putting you far above your typical video game testing peers. Embrace these principles and learn the fundamentals of software testing, and the number of game testing jobs you can be hired for will simply skyrocket.